In 1763 — thirteen years before the Declaration of Independence — a 27-year-old Boston lawyer wrote a satirical letter to the newspaper under the pen name Humphrey Ploughjogger, phonetically spelled like a rustic farmer. The postscript read: “Seems to me if grate Men dont leeve off writing Pollyticks… we shall by and by want a world of Hemp more for our own consumshon.” Internet stoners love this line. They’re reading it wrong.
Adams was talking about hemp rope — specifically, rope for hanging. But the joke was also real policy: he was agitating for American hemp cultivation because he knew the coming fight with Britain was, among other things, a fight over who controlled the rope, canvas, and sails that made an economy possible.
The prickly genius of Braintree
John Adams — born 1735 in Braintree, Massachusetts; Harvard 1755; lawyer, farmer, diarist, pain in the ass — is the founder most underrated by Americans who take him for granted and most revered by historians who actually read him. David McCullough’s Pulitzer-winning John Adams frames him as the working farmer turned intellectual engine of the Revolution. Joseph Ellis’s Passionate Sage calls him the “forgotten founder” whose self-doubt, vanity, and furious honesty made him incapable of posing for posterity. He farmed his whole life. In retirement he signed letters “Farmer John of Stonyfield.”
The renegade who defended the enemy
If you want a renegade move, try this one. On March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a Boston crowd and killed five men. A year later, the Crown’s soldiers stood trial — and every patriot lawyer in Massachusetts refused to touch the case. John Adams took it. His closing argument contains a line that has become the patron saint of evidence-based reasoning: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Six of the eight soldiers were acquitted; two were convicted of manslaughter. Adams lost half his legal practice and later called it “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my Country.” That is renegade — not because he defied convention, but because he defied the mob on principle.
Adams and hemp: a direct, documented relationship
Adams is one of the few founders with a genuine, primary-source advocacy record on hemp, and almost nobody knows it. As “Humphrey Ploughjogger” in the Boston papers throughout 1763 — writing in rustic-yokel dialect to dodge libel charges — Adams agitated for colonists to plant hemp. In a second pseudonymous voice, “U,” he laid out the economics: an acre well-tilled would produce “a Ton Weight, and… a Ton of it is worth Sixty Pounds of Lawful Money.”
Then he did something about it. In February 1776, as a delegate to the Continental Congress, Adams drafted a priority list in which “Hemp to be encouraged and the Manufacture of Duck” — that is, sailcloth — appeared above “Declaration of Independency.” On February 23, 1776, Congress adopted his resolution recommending that the colonies “exert their Utmost Endeavours to promote the Culture of Hemp, Flax and Cotton.” Translation: four months before the Declaration, John Adams got the Continental Congress to pass a hemp-promotion bill — because an independent America would need rope, sails, and cordage to fight a war and build a navy, and none of it could come from Britain anymore. Hemp was the fiber of independence, literally.
No, he wasn’t getting high
This needs to be stated plainly: Adams never smoked, never advocated smoking, and never attributed medicinal powers to cannabis. The Massachusetts Historical Society’s annotation to the Ploughjogger letter is explicit that the “hemp-for-consumption” crack referred to hangman’s rope. Adams, like Washington, treated hemp as a strategic industrial commodity. Nothing more, nothing less.
Why Adams matters for 2026
At the 250th, we could just praise the famous guys. But Adams is the better patron for a renegade brand because he was so relentlessly himself — vain, brilliant, stubborn, wrong about half the time and right about the other half, and willing to get loudly crossways with everyone including his own side. He defended British soldiers. He pushed hemp when the big planters still worshipped tobacco. He nominated a Virginian for commander-in-chief because he knew the Revolution had to be continental. He lost the presidency to his best frenemy, resumed the friendship in retirement, and died on July 4, 1826 — the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration — hours after Jefferson did the same.
Sources
- Humphrey Ploughjogger and “U” letters to the Boston Evening-Post and Boston Gazette, 1763; “Memorandum of Measures to Be Pursued in Congress,” Feb. 1776; Diary and Autobiography of John Adams — Founders Online, National Archives.
- “Adams’ Argument for the Defense: 3–4 December 1770,” Founders Online; Legal Papers of John Adams, vol. 3 (Harvard, 1965).
- Robert J. Taylor, ed., Papers of John Adams, vol. 1 (Harvard, 1977); L. H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 3 (Harvard, 1961).
- David McCullough, John Adams (Simon & Schuster, 2001); Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage (Norton, 1993).
